The Persecution of Homosexuals in the Holocaust

by | Jul 30, 2015 | Sexual Discussion |

Recently, I spent nearly two weeks in The Netherlands with my partner, Dutch, whose family is from this small European country. My take-away from this vacation was not the indulgence in freely available marijuana or the Red Light District and its openly accepted prostitution; I came home still thinking about the Holocaust and its victims. The Holocaust ran from January 30, 1933, to May 8, 1945. The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was a genocide in which six million Jews and countless others were murdered by Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime in the name of racial superiority. The Netherlands alone was home to 107,000 Jews; some arriving there as they fled persecution in their native Germany, which borders The Netherlands to the east. Only 5,000 of the Jews living in The Netherlands survived the Holocaust.   My education about the Holocaust began at Verzetsmuseum (the Dutch Resistance Museum) in Amsterdam. Dutch and I visited this museum because the Dutch Resistance helped save the life of one of Dutch’s family members during World War II. Dutch grew up with knowledge about this group and wanted me to learn about them as well. The Dutch Resistance helped undermine the Nazis during their occupation of The Netherlands in World War II. This group forged birth certificates and passports to help male Dutch citizens avoid working in the German labor camps, which were just slightly better than concentration camps, and to assist in hiding Jewish citizens from the Nazis and avoid deportation to the concentration camps, where death was imminent. The Dutch Resistance provided counterintelligence, domestic sabotage and communications networks that...

How Stress Affects Sexual Health

by | Jul 2, 2015 | Men's Sexual Health, Sexual Discussion, Women's Sexual Health |

When a person experiences stress, his or her body releases cortisol, a steroid hormone. Cortisol belongs to a class of hormones called glucocorticoids, which are present in almost every vertebrate animal cell, and is produced from cholesterol in the two adrenal glands located on top of each kidney. In addition to being released during times of stress, the body releases cortisol after a person wakes up and during and after exercise. Cortisol and the hormone epinephrine, which is also known as adrenaline, work together in “fight-or-flight” responses. After an individual is faced with stress, the adrenals secrete cortisol, which in turn floods the body with glucose (a simple sugar used as a source of energy in living organisms) that supplies immediate energy to large muscles. Cortisol causes this glucose release when it taps into protein stores in the liver. Cortisol’s focus is on supplying the body with glucose for quick energy which is why cortisol blocks insulin production as well. Insulin is a hormone produced in the pancreas that regulates the amount of glucose in the blood. Lack of insulin causes a form of diabetes. As cortisol narrows the arteries, epinephrine increases heart rate. Both of these occurrences force blood to pump harder and faster through the body. Once the stressful situation is resolved, hormone levels return to normal. All this sounds very simple in theory, but many health experts theorize that our fast-paced lifestyles with ever-present stress causes our bodies to pump out cortisol almost constantly, which can have a negative impact on our health in general and on our sexual health in particular. Since cortisol stops the...